The second Serious Sam test is out!! Grab it here at Fileplanet (slow) or here (a faster mirror site). Wow what a great game! It's vastly improved over the first test release back in august and the animations and texture detail have really evolved nicely. It's like a quake/Duke Nukem set in an amazing outdoor nvidia-demo type setting. The enemies are very original and even though the gameplay is very basic in nature it's still a very fun game (think Doom... they throw scores of enemies at you at the same time) . I've even snapped up a bunch of screenshot for your viewing pleasure (taken on a GeForce DDR at 32 bit colour of course). Check 'em out!

That's a real purdy looking temple

uh oh party's over

Checkin' out the scenery

Let me guess, you're not happy to see me

Oh crap!

My that's a big chaingun you have!

Gotta love those new funky textures

Aww...he's so cute when he's sleeping!

Eye candy galore!

Smoke on the water..(and fire in the sky)

Oww.. this is gonna hurt

Those Egyptians really know how to decorate a place

Nice day for a swim

Oh now you got him mad!

Cool!

I think I can see my house from here.

talk about the women flocking to you....

Billy over at Voodoo Extreme popped up a short commentary with the man himself, John Carmack regarding yesterday's big news that 3dfx is closing up shop and selling their assets out to Nvidia. This is a short one so I'll just post the whole darn thing. Here's what the id studmeister had to say:

Billy: I'm sure you've seen the news (nVidia buying up most of 3dfx; 3dfx closing their doors shortly), if you haven't been hit up yet for a comment, anything that you'd actually like to say on this? Does this mean GLide is dead (just kidding)...Do you think, with less competition, we'll start to see the video card market, or rather, video card technology, advance a bit more slowly. Anything else on the closure of 3dfx? I mean, hell, they've been a dominant force for so long, it's honestly kind of strange to see them go.

John Carmack: I have been on 3dfx's technical advisory board for a long time now, and it has been pretty frustrating. We had been meeting quarterly since before Voodoo2 shipped, and the product features we had been discussing the entire time still haven't shipped in a product (rampage). It was painful to watch 3dfx slip from the archetypical kick-ass technology start up to where they wound up. I think I would have been happiest to have the PC market divided up between three strong players that all had their act together, but at this point, I'm not too unhappy with the market simplification resulting from 3dfx exiting. John Carmack

Not to be left out Evil Avatar posted up a bit with Epic programming guru Tim Sweeney and his thoughts on the matter. Here are a few of the spicy bits:

Tim: "NVidia needs to bury the whole Gigapixel chunking architecture they're inhereting. It was a horrible idea. Capturing all your geometry and buffering it up in RAM for later rendering in little chunks was a horrible idea when VideoLogic ran it into the ground; it was a horrible idea when Gigapixel ran it into the ground; and it was still a horrible idea when 3dfx ran it into the ground. Let's hope NVidia kills the damn thing once and for all. 5. A few months ago, I was listening to Alex Leupp's conference call with investors, in which he painted a picture of a bright future filled with opportunity and timely product releases for 3dfx. It didn't occur to me at the time that he was lying through his teeth; he seemed very personable and articulate. Surely the CEO knew they were on their deathbed. Lesson learned: you never find out about these things until it's too late."

Be sure to read up on the rest of it here.

Poor 3dfx, they had good technology but they just couldn't get it to the market on time. Here's hoping that Nvidia will be able to make something cool from their technology.

Holy Shit! Whoa.... Nobody saw this one coming... Nvidia has purchased the core assets of 3dfx as 3dfx has announced that they have run out of money and have not been able to secure a line of credit. This is truely a sad day for gaming as 3dfx was the original pioneer of the 3D graphics industry. Nvidia gets all of 3dfx's technology as well as trademarks such as "3dfx" and the Voodoo brand name while 3dfx receives $70 million plus an additional $50 million in Nvidia stock. 3dfx is also recommending to it's shareholders that the company be dissolved over the next few months. Here's a snip from the Press release where 3dfx's CEO Alex Lapp discusses today's events:

"After aggressively pursuing a wide range of options that take into consideration the interests of our creditors, our shareholders, our employees and our customers," said Alex Leupp, president and CEO, 3dfx Interactive Inc., "we strongly believe that to reduce expenses, sell our assets and dissolve the company provides the highest return to our creditors, shareholders, and employees." "We expect that the combined technologies of 3dfx and NVIDIA will continue the legacy that 3dfx began in 1994, " Leupp continued. "NVIDIA is the number one supplier of graphics technology to the OEM market. With the addition of 3dfx's high-quality technology that leads the retail market, we believe the combination of the two will result in even greater PC graphics leadership."

Read the whole darn press release right Here. Voodoo Extreme also has a letter from 3dfx's CTO Scott Sellers to all of their customers. Here's a little bit of it:

While we firmly believe this agreement is in the best interest of all involved, we deeply regret these actions. Again, we want to extend our sincerest thanks to everyone one of you who helped 3dfx revolutionize 3D graphics and 3D gaming on the PC. Rest assured, the 3dfx legacy will live on through the combined strengths of these two great companies.

Finally, if you're still craving more info check out the FAQ on this that Nvidia has posted on their website here. Hopefully other competitors like ATI can step up to the plate and deliver a little more competition for Nvidia. It looks like the stakes just got higher!

Update: Gamers Depot has slapped up an interview with Brian Burke, former PR guy at 3dfx and now Senior PR manager at Nvida. There's some pretty spicy stuff in this interview! Check it out:

GD: Did you know about this before you left 3dfx?

Brian: No, I never caught wind of this before I left I was looking for some more stability for my future

Read all about it here.

Looks like Stomped decided to post up a little interview with none other than Mr John Romero himself, who apparently is still hiding out in an underground bunker somewhere in the middle east after his last disastrous abomination cleverly and horrifically disguised as a "game".

Here's an interesting little tidbit from the "interview":

Stomped: "What can we expect from you in the year 2001 in terms of the games you are developing?"

Romero: "Heh, it's a secret! From now on, I'm keeping quiet about my current projects..."

So it seems that Dr Evil (oops, I mean Romero) has decided to covertly subvert an unsuspecting gamer population by utilizing the most sacred form of media (games of course) in a cruel and unusual way of mercilessly infiltrating the public consciousness. For what point you may ask? (cue the ominous music) Why to take over the world of course!(and inevitably to promote inferior Romero-branded hair care products)... I predict that forecoming signs of the said apocalypse will be ungodly swarms of huge frogs and flies and overabundant use of butt ugly nuclear-green colors. Hmm....now that I think of it, where did that phase the "little green men" come from?! Egads, he must be more powerful than we feared!

In other (and possibly unrelated) news, it looks like there's no good software for the Playstation 2! Gasp! Who would have thought it about an over-hyped, over-priced, under-produced, console/entertainment-device/toaster? Even the unwashed masses and PS2 faithful are starting to doubt and (dare I say) bash their precious model of media-driven mindless consumerism?! Newsweek has the shocking and gory details HERE. Not only is there a lack of good games for the PS2 but is looks as though some are actually still running Praystation one games on it in a desperate attempt at gaming relief.... Behold the grim details:

“What are you playing on it?” asked Hiroyuki, who goes by one name. The audience of 50 gameplayers and designers fell silent, then succumbed to giggles. “Dragon Quest for PS1,” someone finally offered sheepishly, referring to a game for the first, supposedly outdated PlayStation 1.

Unreal Universe has the scoop on some comments made by members of the Duke Nuken Forever team on the 3drealms message board. Some pretty juicy stuff here folks. Listen to this little snippet from Brandon "Greenmarine" Reinhart :

"As George implies here, our goal is to focus as much on DX8 as possible and that includes any engine modifications necessary to achieve great framerate. We've already made SIGNIFICANT changes to the Unreal engine's span buffer based occlusion model to increase framerate. We are also making changes to the mesh pipeline and other elements of the engine to take advantage of DX features like hardware transform. "

"The Unreal engine is heavily CPU bound, so our focus on optimization is more on releasing that CPU tension. For example: the Unreal engine uses span buffering for occlusion. This approach has a lot of benefits, but is CPU intensive. We have saved a lot of framerate by reducing the complexity of the span calculations and reducing the number of required calculations. This kind of optimization is unrelated to the render API layer."

Be Sure to check out the whole comment thread HERE ! George Broussard also comments on the next Duke game's Direct X support and offers his opinions on the state of the Glide and OpenGL APIs... (by the way, if you didn't get today's headline it's time to grab a copy of the original Duke Nukem 3D ! :-)

Seems like with Christmas coming everyone has been very busy. I've been busy studying for my A+ Course and a number of other things. :) Haven't been home much the past week so that's why I haven't been able to post updates. I'm not sure what Rune's excuse is though :) As for Marauders post about me overwriting his post on December 2nd, well he overwrote mine first that morning :P

A lot has happened since my last post. Red Leader & I ran a tournament for the CPL Counter-Strike Qualifier and $1000.00 cash was up for grabs last weekend. It was held at the Gaming Arena on the Danforth in Toronto. Red Leader did a write-up on the event, thanks go out to .ki.test for use of the facility.

"Pentium 4 price cuts this weekend?" Attention desktop shoppers: Check out the chip sale on aisle 4. Intel may mark down its desktop processors this weekend, including the new Pentium 4 chip. You could save up to 11%. The big chip sale could be Intel's way of pushing Pentium 4 into the mainstream.

"Shockwave virus upgraded to high risk" The worm that's sending shockwaves through cyberspace is still wriggling into inboxes. Anti-virus company McAfee has upgraded the ProLin virus from medium risk to high risk. ProLin arrives in an e-mail as a "creative exe" attachment with the subject line, "A great shockwave flash movie."

Who let the hackers out? A security group led by the FBI says a new wave of cyber attacks is at hand and companies doing business on the Internet need to batten down the hatches. Authorities say known vulnerabilities in Windows NT and, to a lesser extent, Unix operating systems, are the open doors the infothieves are using to get inside.

"Microsoft urges people not to use the Internet" The tongue may be holed up in the cheek in "The Register's" headline, but the Britwits do have a point. Microsoft has put an online form on its Web site that will tell you the level of risk you run of having unlicensed or pirated software. One of the questions MS asks is: "How did you acquire the software installed on your workstations/servers?". If you pick any of the Net-related options, you're put at a high risk level. So does this mean using the Net is a bad and risky idea?

"Checking Your Connection Speed" If you have users who are complaining that their Internet connection speed is too slow, there are all sorts of tests that you can do to check out what's happening with the connection. Many involve just making sure that the entries on the TCP/IP properties sheet are correct, and indeed this is where many administrators stop, with a shake of the head and something like, "Well, everything seems to be OK, so.." Now you can do more. A free Web site called PCPitstop, which is staffed by some of the former techies from and contributors to Windows Magazine, offers some ActiveX control that you can click on to test Internet connection speed right in the browser. The site will download random text from its Website to the connected PC, measure the time for the download and report on the connection speed. If the speed isn't what you should be getting, (the site offers benchmarks for what you can reasonably expect) and you're pretty sure that the problem isn't in the connection beyond the PC (your LAN, your backbone connection, etc.) then you can download various fixes to solve the problem. Many of them come in the form or Registry patches, so you should, of course, backup the registry before you make any changes. If something goes wrong, you can then get back to where you started, even if it was slow enough to get you to the download patch in the first place. PCPitstop will also test a user's PC, compare it with other similar PCs, and offers a database of test results you can use to compare your company's PCs with those that other users have had tested. There are also some diagnostic downloads to check out connection problems, and more. -This info was provided to me by: David Gabel